Vista may be coming out next year, but if like me you can’t afford to upgrade to Vista then why not show your current PC some love this Christmas and give it a tune up?

I’ve just reinstalled Windows XP as I’ve treated my PC to a new motherboard for Christmas. Here are some of the tweaks I’ve done so far to make my machine faster, which I think are worth sharing.

Disable Last Access Update To Speed Up Access To Files

When XP opens folders it can waste a lot of time trying to update the last access time. To stop XP doing this requires a registry tweak:

1. Open Regedit by going to ‘Start’. Click on ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’
2. Navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem’
3. Right-click and select ‘DWORD Value’
4. Enter ‘NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate’ as your new DWORD Value
5. Once you’ve created the DWORD value, right-click on the new DWORD and click ‘Modify’
6. Change the Value Data to ‘1′
7. Click ‘OK’

Disable Indexing Services

Disabling Indexing Services can provide a significant performance increase depending on how you use your computer. If you rarely search for files on your PC then you should turn it off, to stop XP wasting time keeping the search index up to date. It also take up large amounts of RAM and can make your PC sound noisy.

Here’s how to turn off indexing:

1. Go to ‘Start’
2. Click ‘Settings’ then click on ‘Control Panel’
3. Next, click on ‘Add/Remove Programs’
4. Click the ‘Add/Remove Window Components’
5. Uncheck the ‘Indexing services’
6. Click ‘Next’

Clean Up Your Hard Drive

Over time you’ll be amazed how much crap can accumulate on your PC taking up valuable space. The best and quickest way to cleanup your hard drive is to install and run CCleaner. CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It also can clean remove all traces of what you’ve been doing online.

1. Install CCleaner
2. Once it’s installed Right-click on your Recycle bin and click ‘Open CCleaner’
3. Click on ‘Cleaner’ in the left-hand navigation
4. Tick ‘Internet Explorer’ and ‘Windows Explorer’ and ‘System’
5. Untick ‘Cookies’, ‘History’, ‘Recently Typed URLs’ and ‘Last Download Location’ in the Internet Explorer Sub-menu if you don’t want to lose your internet history
6. Next click on the ‘Applications’ Tab at the top and tick the applications you want to clean
7. Then click on ‘Analyze’ in the bottom right hand corner and CCleaner will start its magic
8. Once CCleaner finishes analysing it will tell you how much space it can free up. If you like what you see, click ‘Run Cleaner’ and the files will be removed

Speedup Folder Browsing

On most PCs, everytime a folder is opened there will be slight delay, while XP searches for any network files or printers. Stopping XP doing this can make a big difference to folder browsing speeds:

1. Open My Computer and click open the ‘Tools’ menu
2. Select ‘folder options’ and then select the ‘view’ tab
3. Uncheck ‘Automatically search for network folders and printers’
4. Click ‘Apply’ and then click ‘Ok’
5. If you are prompted to reboot your pc then do so

Make Your PC Boot Faster

If you don’t regularly clean your temp and history folder then XP will waste time checking these folders everytime you boot your PC. To stop this, you can create a batch file that will clear the temp and history folders when you shutdown your PC, so that your PC won’t waste time checking these folders the next time it starts up:

• Open Notepad and create a new file with the following entries:

1. RD /S /q “C:\Documents and Settings\”UserName without quotes”\Local Settings\History”
2. RD /S /q “C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\History”
3. RD /S /q “D:\Temp\” < –”Deletes temp folder, type in the location of your temp folder

• Save the new file as ‘cleantemp.bat’ somewhere where you can find it easily
• Now go to ‘Start’ and select ‘Run’
• Type in‘gpedit.msc’ and click ‘Ok’
• Click on ‘Computer Configuration’ then ‘Windows Settings’
• Click on ‘Scripts’ and then on ‘Shutdown’
• Click ‘Add’ and find the batch file that you created and then press ‘Ok’

That’s it. I’ll post some more ways to give your PC a treat later on in the week.

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